# Welcome to Planet Stacker X

Planet Stacker X is a suite of astrophotography tools designed to help capture detailed photos of the solar system's planets or detailed photos of the moon or sun's surface via a process known as Lucky Imaging. 

### Introduction To Lucky Imaging
Planetary astrophotography has always been a challenging hobby for both astronomers and photographers. Capturing detailed images of planets is hindered by the fact that the Earth's atmosphere is constantly in motion, with large heat variance creating atmopsheric distortion. 

This atmopsheric distortion causes light from celestial objects to refract in random ways, creating a shimmering effect known as "seeing." This shimmering effect is particularly noticable when taking photos of objects at the long focal lengths required for planetary astrophotography. It is nearly impossible to achieve stable and sharp focus of celestial objects.

 One innovative technique that has significantly improved the quality of planetary images is a technique known as Lucky Imaging.

### How Lucky Imaging Works

Lucky imaging is a method that involves taking a large number of short-exposure images of a celestial object, such as a planet or the surface of the moon or the sun, and then selecting the sharpest ones to combine into a single high-quality image. The principle behind this technique is relatively straightforward:

- **Image Capture:** A high-speed camera, usually attached to a telescope, will capture thousands of images in quick succession. Each exposure is short enough (typically a few milliseconds) to freeze the atmospheric turbulence that causes blurring.
- **Image Selection:** An algorithm analyzes these images and selects the best, sharpest frames where the effects of atmospheric distortion are most minimal.
- **Image Stacking:** The selected "lucky" frames are then aligned and averaged together to reduce noise and produce a final, sharpened image.
- **Image Processing:** Furthur processing such as wavelet sharpening and contrast enhancement are then applied to create a final, high quality version of an image.

### Planet Stacker X

Planet Stacker X is a suite of software tools to assist in the process of Lucky Imaging. It has three main tools:
- **Image Capture Tool:** This tool will connect to an external camera to capture thousands of images of the planet as a raw, uncompressed, video stream.
- **Image Stacking Tool:** This tool will help you analyze the raw, uncompressed, frames of the video stream to find the sharpest images. It will then align the sharp images and stack them into a final image ready for editing.
- **Image Editor Tool:** This tool will then process the final stacked image using advanced techniques, such as wavelet sharpening, to create a final detailed image of the planet or planetary surface.

Planet Stacker X also provides a batch processing tool, useful for processing multiple video streams.
